“You may be Brilliant, But You Make Us Feel Stupid"

The feedback came through an anonymous survey. We had guaranteed anonymity specifically so people would say the real thing, and they did.

"Amit is one of the smartest people in any room he's in. He also makes it very clear that he knows that. And it shuts the room down."

I read it three times. Then I forwarded it to myself so I'd have it on my phone.

Then I went for a walk and tried to figure out how many years I'd been doing this without knowing it… More than I was comfortable counting.

The Specific Thing I Was Doing

I didn't think I was arrogant. I thought I was efficient. When someone was working toward an answer I could already see, I'd finish their sentence, to save time.

When a proposal had a flaw in the third paragraph, I'd flag it before they reached it, to be helpful. When a meeting started drifting, I'd redirect it, to keep things moving.

Each individual action had a justification. The cumulative effect was a room full of people who had stopped trying to get to the answer because I was always already there.

Brilliance without patience isn't leadership. It's a performance.

"Intelligence deployed without empathy doesn't build better teams. It builds quieter ones."

What Changed

I made myself a rule. In every meeting for the next sixty days: last to speak on any topic I had a view on.

Not quiet; engaged, listening, asking. But I would not be the one to reach the conclusion first.

The first two weeks were physically uncomfortable. I'd have an answer forming before the question had finished being asked, and I'd hold it.

Let the silence sit. Ask a question instead of providing one.

What happened: people finished their own thoughts. They arrived at good answers, sometimes different from mine, sometimes better.

They started building on each other's ideas rather than waiting for mine to validate or invalidate theirs. The room got smarter as a group because I stopped being the room's brain.

The Harder Lesson

The feedback stung because it was accurate. And it pointed at something I had to sit with: being the smartest person in the room had become part of my identity.

Releasing it wasn't just a tactical adjustment, it was an identity adjustment.

The leaders who have shaped me most weren't the ones with the best answers. They were the ones who made me believe I had the capacity to find the answer myself.

That is a completely different skill, and it requires the ego to get out of the way.

The measure of leadership isn't how much you know. It's how much you make the people around you capable of knowing.

I still have my phone note. I still read it occasionally. It's the most useful piece of professional feedback I've ever received, and it came from an anonymous form that took someone about thirty seconds to fill out.

Where are you solving problems that your team should be solving, and what is that costing them in confidence and capability?

Humility and Self-Awareness are two of the twenty traits in Half & Half.

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